A promdi and jologs at heart, Hector Bryant L. Macale works for the Manila-based media NGO Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR) as senior staffwriter. He is now the managing editor of the Philippine Journalism Review Reports (PJR Reports), CMFR's flagship media-monitoring publication. All his posts are solely his rants, raves, and musings, unless stated otherwise.

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

The Filipino Librarian is right. "Before September 11 was hijacked and became 9/11," he wrote, "the day was better known to Filipinos as the birthday of Ferdinand Marcos, former President of the Philippines."

Saying that "there is a lot that has already been written about Marcos—and there's probably a lot more that will never be written," the Filipino Librarian focused on Marcos's inaugural address on December 30 1965. He pointed out that he talked about "a young patriot... (who) fell from a tyrant’s bullet and out of the martyr’s blood that flowed copiously there sprang a new nation." He was referring to Jose Rizal and the birth of the first Philippine republic, according to the Filipino Librarian. "But he may as well have been predicting the death of Ninoy Aquino and the end of his dictatorship, too."In his speech "To be Great Again," Marcos said: "... Armed with nothing but raw courage and passionate intelligence and patriotism, our predecessors built the noble edifice of the First Asian Republic." He added: "Today the challenge is less dramatic but no less urgent. We must repeat the feat of our forebears in a more commonplace sphere, away from the bloody turmoil of heroic adventure – by hastening our social and economic transformation. For today, the Filipino, it seems, has lost his soul, his dignity and his courage."

"This nation," he then said, "can be great again."

Read more here. Interesting insight, I must say.Marcos's September connection was also discussed by former PJR Reports editor Luis V. Teodoro in the October 2002 of PJR Reports (then known as the Philippine Journalism Review).

"The rest of the world may attach a different significance to it nowadays," Teodoro wrote in his article "Following the Leader," "But September 11 has been a significant date for Filipinos since 1972."

"The year marked the declaration of martial law, the first open attempt to place the country under a dictatorship," he added. "That declaration also happened in September -- on the 21st, or ten days afdter the 55th birthday of the one man in Philippine history whose name is indissolubly linked with it, Ferdinand Edralin Marcos."

Describing Marcos's one-man rule a "catastrophe worse than a combination of natural disasters", his one-man rule also set "democratization back by at least 20 years, reversing a process in which political participation was visibly widening in the early 1970s."

He said that what was a chilling possibility then in 2002, was that "the political and military centers of power in the Philippines, rather than departing from (Marcos's) example, have discovered something eminently worse than that the law can be sued to suppress the Bill of Rights."

Teodoro ended his article by saying: "It is that they can ignore the law, with few being either the wiser or being overly concerned. In this they have not departed from Marcos's authoritarian example, however, but are only following the leader."

With the growing dictatorial tendencies of the government led by Pres. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, are we seeing a return of Martial Law in the country?

About the Writer

Hector Bryant L. Macale works for the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR) as senior staffwriter. He is the assistant editor of Philippine Journalism Review Reports (PJR Reports), the flagship media-monitoring publication of CMFR. PJR Reports is the first and only publication of its kind in the country and has served as a model for various press communities around Asia.